, leaving
none to represent them: the men who marry women they have been weak
enough and silly enough to fall in love with, recruit the race with fine
and vigorous and intelligent children, fortunately compounded of the
complementary traits derived from two fairly contrasted and mutually
reinforcing individualities.

I have spoken throughout, for argument's sake, as though the only
interest to be considered in the married relation were the interests of
the offspring, and so ultimately of the race at large, rather than of
the persons themselves who enter into it. But I do not quite see why
each generation should thus be sacrificed to the welfare of the
generations that afterwards succeed it. Now it is one of the strongest
points in favour of the system of falling in love that it does, by
common experience in the vast majority of instances, assort together
persons who subsequently prove themselves thoroughly congenial and
helpful to one another. And this result I look upon as one great proof
of the real value and importance of the instinct. Most men and women
select for themselves partners for life at an age when they know but
little of the world, when they judge but superficially of characters and
motives, when they still make many mistakes in the conduct of life and
in the estimation of chances. Yet most of them find in after days that
they have really chosen out of all the world one of the persons best
adapted by native idiosyncrasy to make their joint lives enjoyable and
useful. I make every allowance for the effects of habit, for the growth
of sentiment, for the gradual approximation of tastes and sympathies;
but surely, even so, it is a common consciousness with every one of us
who has been long married, that we could hardly conceivably have made
ourselves happy with any of the partners whom others have chosen; and
that we have actually made ourselves so with the partners we chose for
ourselves under the guidance of an almost unerring native instinct. Yet
adaptation between husband and wife, so far as their own happiness is
concerned, can have had comparatively little to do with the evolution of
the instinct, as compared with adaptation for the joint production of
vigorous and successful offspring. Natural selection lays almost all the
stress on the last point, and hardly any at all upon the first one. If,
then, the instinct is found on the whole so trustworthy in the minor
matter, for which it has not specially bee